A quick intro bout me and my skating journey!

Hi everyone! My name is James or you can call me elijah (yes my government name is James elijah) i respond to both names, I’m 24 this year and recently graduated from republic polytechnic and I’m currently serving my national service.

Some of my hobbies include gaming, skating and movies! For games, im not into competitive games as it makes my anger issues more prominent so i play more PVE focused games such as Helldivers 2, star citizen and the a bit of casual pvp from the recently released battlefield 6. When it comes to movies my fav genre is sci fi and im a huge star wars fan particularly the clone wars era where most of my favourite characters are which has led me to getting 2 star wars based tattoos and wanting more! (3rd and 4th pic) But, i do love a good 80’s action film once in awhile to relive the nostalgia ( the first predator film for reference ).

At the beginning of my skate journey, it was an afterthought born out of a recent situation where i voluntarily left a job. One of my ex colleagues who i worked with at this previous job was a skateboarder mainly doing street skating ( i think 😅 ). I was pretty lost after leaving that job as it was a really good job with good people and i considered it a hobby at the time. With the loss of this job, i was left with nothing to do but to sit on my chair and game. It took a few days but i eventually came to terms with the loss and started thinking about the next adventure, I was thinking about going back to team sports again but I remember the pressure from basketball and gave team sports a no go. So solo sports it was, i looked on the internet with a google search and as fate would have it, i saw the words “inline skating”.

Looking at the word inline skating lit a lightbulb inside my head, I wasn’t good with skates however, i remembered my ex colleague who used to do skateboarding and did some digging into skateboarding. It looked way too cool with all the kickflips, ollie’s and shuv’s. The first thought in my head was “thats way too scary, i can’t do that”. So i researched more and came across a video on youtube by a company called Odyssey Boards. It was a video about these cool guys going out on a cruise ( getting from point A to B ) and showing the route they took with their longboards.

After looking through more of their videos and online pages. I was HOOKED, binging every single longboarding and skating beginner guides and what type of boards to get. I’ve never been so invested in a sport before and even though i’ve had no prior experience skating before, I ended ordering a small penny board from decathalon to try out.

The first few days on the board was rough i was learning on my own as i was too anxious to go for a class so there were lots of balancing issues, falling and generally 0 commitment when learning how to lean into a turn or pushing forward. Not gonna lie, after watching a few more videos and 2 or 3 practice sessions on my own i actually got the hang of the basics in skating.

A few months down the road, i decided that the penny board was too small for me ( I’m 1.78cm for reference ) and decided to head down to decathalon to buy a new board style to try, ended up picking a small cruiser board bigger than the penny with more space and better turning radius. I was flying with that thing once i stepped on it, eventually though i did drop that board into the longkang 💀 whilst on my FIRST cruise with an outside group. I lost a lot of aura points and face on that day, luckily though i had money to pick up a new board so this time i bought a 44inch pintail board with a wider deck and bigger wheels. It was great for cruising being able to go over gaps easily, maintain speed and provide enough space for my long legs to stretch, I used it for about 3 months before i took the next big leap.

By this point I was looking for a job to sustain myself through school and earn abit of cash, i just happened to see a job advertisement by Odyssey for their store team and decided to apply for it. I received an email asking if i was interested to come in for an interview, did the interview and got accepted into the job. My bosses were so nice throughout my store team days and even offered me a board that i had been eyeing on ever since joining which was their 42 inch freestyle board.

Its still crazy to think that one act of kindness kickstarted my freestyle and dance journey. I began practicing with a group of friends that i met during one of the sessions and it spiraled into trying more boards, skating 3 days a week and winning 3rd place in my first competition.

It lead me to starting to coach for Odyssey as well which i did for the better half of the last 2 years. I wasn’t the perfect coach but i did my best to teach everyone what i knew and how i learnt to skate so that they can make it their own journey.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk! My thoughts are everywhere rn so do gimme some pointers on how i can improve on my next post!

#MyPOV

#tldr

#longboardsg

#introduction Singapore